Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

Upstairs there are two bedrooms. We split up because we can. Before sleep, the smallness of the house, the tidy afghans on the beds, the dormer windows, make me think of El. She’s probably watching TV. She’s probably thinking about me, same way I think about her, same way I think about the baby every night, wondering and wondering and worrying across the distance.

In the morning the sunlight in the room makes me wish we could stay here and play house. Buy a broom for the kitchen. Clear out the dust and cook dinner. Get that phone working again and call El.

The house is so still, for a minute I worry that Ruth went on without me, but just as I think it, she appears at my door. Time to go. I remove the foot massager from my bag. I use it once before stowing it underneath the bed so that whoever lands here next can give it a try before falling off to sleep.

We pass a field of electric monsters, high-voltage transformers marching across a marshland. Each day some things beautiful and some things ugly. We pass a house held up by the pure junk hoarded inside and out. Tractors, cars, refrigerators, old metal beds. We come to a town where the men wear camo. Two teenage boys have tattoos on their necks, instantly halving the alienation they’d hoped to achieve. A sign outside a church speaks to God. LORD, it asks, GRANT US G—, but the last letters are gone. I fill in: groceries, gumballs, gorillas, good, clean fun. We pass a trailer park called Presidential Estates, an unbuilt development that exists only as a sign: MADISON FARMS. There’s another basement gun shop, ugly new homes, falling-down old ones, and a street called No Lake Avenue.

That night we eat dinner at a dairy bar. We sleep in an apple orchard and wake to find the honeybees hard at work above us.

A pickup truck pulls over. The truck is just a shell of a vehicle, seems hard to believe it can still be used as transportation. A man with a blue baseball cap waves. He looks friendly. He wears his hair in a long braid down his back. I like that. You’d have to have done some thinking to be a man in braids. We haven’t yet hitchhiked. What kind of maniacs hitchhike? Those who want to get chopped to bits. But here’s a man offering us a ride. He doesn’t even look scary. I’m tired and Ruth is scarier than anyone.

“Yes. Thank you.”

He steps around to the passenger side door and opens it for us. There’s a plastic tab on the back of his jeans fake-branded to read PABLO CORTEZ, AUTHENTIC LEGWEAR.

Ruth climbs in first. He helps me into the cab. “Thank you.” His radio choices, wrappers from snacks his body got rid of weeks ago, years ago — it’s weird stepping into the intimate space of a stranger. Ruth removes her earphones. She wants to hear the conversation, or maybe she thinks it’s rude to listen to music other people can’t hear. Other people besides me.

The truck’s been used harshly. The door panels and console are gone. It’s like we are riding inside the old bones of a horse, the old empty bones of a dinosaur.

“Where are you headed?”

Ruth studies him, looking like a wild animal ready to bite. So far she’s not done anything like that.

“I’m Sequoya,” the man says. “You know what I’m named for?”

“No.”

“You know those trees out in California? The tall ones.”

“Redwoods.”

“Kind of. Sequoias. Like redwoods.”

“You’re named after a tree.”

“Nope. I’m named after the man they named the trees for, Chief Sequoya. He invented the Cherokee alphabet.”

That’s not his name, and he’s got a thimbleful of native blood in his left toe. Same as me, same as everyone in North America. I say nothing, but he seems to intuit exactly what I’m thinking.

“You don’t believe me?”

“You’re Cherokee?” I ask.

“Muh-heck Heek Ing.”

“What’s that?”

“Mahican.”

Last of, I can’t help but think it. They must hate that book. “A full-blooded Indian?”

“No.”

I knew it.

“Mbuy, wtayaatamun ndah.”

“Pardon?”

“He requires my heart.”

“Who?”

“The water.”

I shift, uncomfortable a moment.

The man smiles. “What are your names?”

“I’m Cora and she’s Ruth.”

He draws his chin back to get a look at us. “Yes,” he says. “She don’t talk much.”

“No. She doesn’t.” I smile as if Ruth’s silence is just the friendliest thing.

“She forgot how?”

The engine chugs and an old cassette player suited to this dried-up truck chews through the end of a tape, then clicks and spits, flipping over. Classic rock. Pine trees line one side of the road. The Erie, looking just like a river, skirts the other side.

“Forty thousand men and women every day. Forty thousand men and women every day,” the old radio sings.

Sequoya peps up. “You’ve been traveling awhile?”

I think he means we stink. “Yes, bu—”

Suddenly the other side of the road in the windshield. Squealing, a crunch of bone and metal. Two minutes into this drive and we nearly wrecked. Sequoya lifts his foot off the clutch. The truck jerks and stalls. “Mother! Did you see that?” A buck with four points had jumped up out of the canal and in front of the truck. It looks around, making sure he’s got all his parts. His back left leg dangles from the halfway mark. The deer takes off into the woods, even with a bum leg. Sequoya reaches behind the seat for a rifle. “Excuse me.” He leaves us parked, sprawled across both lanes, key in the ignition. The buck runs as fast as he can. The fake-Indian boy gives chase into the pines at the edge of the road. The woods are thick, and in a few steps he’s disappeared into them.

Ruth moves slowly. She rubs the spot where her head hit the rearview, then closes his door. Together we ratchet the bench seat forward. She turns the key, and the music switches back on. “Come on, baby.”

We don’t get more than a mile away before she stops the truck. She opens the glove box. Ruth find his registration card. Clifford Sequoya Shue. It’s out-of-date but, still, that’s his real name. She finds a bottle of water and a small box of tissues that seem the most tender thing a man could have in his glove box. What awful job did Clifford Sequoya hold down in order to purchase this sorry vehicle? How long has he been driving it? Ruth turns the truck around, and in another mile he’ll never know we almost stole it. She parks on the shoulder. She clears a couple of pieces of hard plastic — what was once Clifford’s headlight — from the road as penance for our attempted larceny. I use one of his tissues to wipe spit from the corners of my lips.

Eventually Sequoya reappears, lugging the deer over his back. The beast is taller than he is. Its hooves drag a wake of forest debris. Ruth opens the truck’s bed and lifts the hind legs from Sequoya’s back like lifting a bridal veil off a bloody bride. The deer’s chin hangs over his neck. He uses the antlers as handles. Blood spots the ground. The body trembles the bed when it lands. I see its brown eyes, its loose, lifeless tongue. Sequoya fetches the water from the glove box. He pours a drink of it over the dead deer’s tongue. “There,” he tells the deer. “You won’t remember any of that.” He turns to Ruth. “I’m out of season.” She produces our blue tarp, and he hides the animal underneath it. A bit of my stomach brew burns the back of my throat. I don’t feel so good. I hold on to the baby. Ruth squeezes me into the middle of the bench. Blood has dripped down Clifford’s authentic legwear.

“You all need a place to sleep tonight?”

“Yes.”

So Sequoya drives us back to his trailer. It’s on his grandparents’ property, a small plot with access to the canal. “Good boy,” his grandfather says. Together they string the deer up by its hind legs, binding it to a tree limb behind the house. Split open from chin to tail, the deer drips blood into a rusted pan. I’ve never been so close to a dead thing, at least not that I know of.